Tchotchkes: Media Bias (to Republicans)

Oops, just had to get this one in before I signed off until mid-June!

Sidebar: Karen On Hold

This blog is now "on hold"--there will be no further postings until mid-June.  I will be on "vacation" from my laptop and the internet and taking a long-planned extended trip to and through.....can you guess from the photo?  

Thanks for reading, and I will return. 



Tchotchkes: Uncle Jay Explains Congress

Another amusing semi-political parody from somebody's funny uncle.  This is from 2007 but it could have been done yesterday. Thanks to my good friend Mary B. for telling me about him; I hope to publish more of his videos in the future. 

Politi-Score: The Beast is Yet to Come

The website The Daily Beast recently jumped on the PolitiFact scoring bandwagon complimented with a gallery pictorial 1 to 10 ranking review of what it describes as the “Most Ignorant Politicians.” I beg to differ with that, as I believe those that are listed may just be dumb…like a fox, as they say. Their “scoring” methodology, which is more akin to a "Pants-On-Fire Meter," is explained as follows:

The Daily Beast tried to measure the most fact-challenged politicians in America, who, based on their public statements, apparently need to brush up on their high-school reading. For our data, we relied on Politifact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning website founded by the St. Petersburg Times, which independently verifies or corrects statements made by public officials. We limited our pool to well-known politicians with at least six statements inspected by Politifact, and then assigned a point system based on Politifact’s Truth-O-Meter designations:

0 points for True or Mostly True statements

1 point for Half True or Barely True statements

3 points for False statements

5 points for Pants on Fire statements—the most absurd, ridiculous statements

For the final ranking, we took each politician’s point total and divided by the total number of statements analyzed by Politifact for each politician. Care to take an educated guess at America’s Most Ignorant Politician?  Click here to find out.

I’m assuming the “True” and “Mostly True” rulings, even though scored zero, are included in the “divided by all rulings” number, which would serve to mitigate the overall calculated number. But you will notice, looking at the scores as I calculated below for the Top Ten with my dataset as collected through the end of 2010, that from an intuitive standpoint, the Daily Beast scores (“DB-Scores”) are not easy to interpret. Here are the top ten “Most Ignorant” using the Daily Beast scoring applied to my through-2010 database, with the Politi-Score next to it. While the Politi-Score trends in the opposite direction to the Daily Beast scores, it does not correspond exactly. This is because the “score 5 for Pants on Fire” really skews its overall calculation, as can be seen by Michele Bachmann, who has received a LOT of Pants on Fire rulings, and has a 3.92 overall grade towering way above everyone else.

The names highlighted "pink" (red) show the Republicans.

When Dummies Get Called Home

Lil White Lies: Food Stamp Jesus

Recently newly-declared Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich made a statement which some considered racially tinged about Obama, which PolitiFact (PF) ruled as Half True.  Because my conservative counterpart Bryan White claims it was taken out of its proper context, here’s the complete quote:

You want to be a country that creates food stamps, in which case frankly Obama's is an enormous success …The most successful food stamp president in American history. Or do you want to be a country that creates paychecks?

Bryan claims that Gingrich “used food stamps as an "analogy" (metaphor's more like it) to Obama's approach of relying on government action rather than private initiative. It isn't that Obama gave out food stamps, it's that he did not pursue successful job-creating policies.”

In the interview with David Gregory where Gingrich was asked for clarification he said that Obama “follows the same destructive political model that destroyed the city of Detroit. I follow the model that Rick Perry and others have used to create more jobs in Texas.”

But how are things really going in Texas?

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is reporting that food-stamp participation in Texas jumped from 2.68 million individuals in August to 2.95 million in September.

As the economic hard times continue, it is likely that those numbers will increase, officials estimate.

“Texas ranks 47th in the nation in the number of food-secure families, meaning we have more people wondering where their next meal will come from than almost any other state,” says Celia Hagert, senior policy analyst at the Texas Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin-based think tank.

So if this is true, what is Newt Gingrich talking about? And this was in 2008, right at the start of the recession. From 2009 to 2010, Texas’s food stamp usage increased a whopping 24.6%. However, Newt is correct is one respect: food stamps have a lot to do with lack of jobs, or BAD jobs (not the kind that used to be  in Detroit), which I’ve addressed here before:

Sidebar: Miserable in Mississippi

Earlier this year I posted about the curious trends noticeable in health statistics collected for the “Ten Most Healthy” as compared to the “Ten Least Healthy” states. The chart I originally posted listing the states may be more difficult to read, so I decided to average it together and here is what I came up with:

The Ten “Most Healthy” states are, in order: Vermont, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Utah, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Idaho, Maine and Washington. The Ten “Least Healthy” states are Lousiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Nevada and Georgia. There may be some argument over how “red” or “blue” the states are, but it should be pretty obvious, especially in the case of the “Least Healthy”, that the red states predominate.

Sometimes I think this is something Liberals and Democrats aren’t considering. If I was a Democratic congressperson, I’d be on the floor of congress with bigger, more colorful graphs and asking those in Republican strongholds such as South Carolina, Texas, and Oklahoma why their policies have not resulted in healthier, more insured constituencies, and why in the hell do they have to take more Federal money than they send back. I might even ask the Congressional Budget Office, if I had that power, to calculate the costs of having a 39% higher incidence of diabetes, more obesity, more deaths from heart disease and cancer in those states, especially given the fact that more of these people go without health insurance.

On the positive side, there are better job opportunities (or opportunities to “make a living”) in the “unhealthy” states, and there is less personal debt, less than half the debt on average, than those in the healthy states. It should be noted almost every “Least Healthy” state was a “right to work (for less)” state, while most of the “Healthier” states were not. Which basically might mean that you probably can’t get as much credit with a lower-paying job (in a “least healthy” state), so you don’t get into as much debt.